Sameness and Difference in Art and Design

 

Is there a difference between art and design? Today, as distinctions between many previously discrete concepts become increasingly ambiguous, it is an appropriate time to reconsider the traditionally held differences between the two.  Although the discussion is not a new one, the current ascendance of design gives renewed relevance to questioning the validity of art’s conventionally privileged position. The increasing visibility, market value, and wide-ranging interest in design today, offer an opportunity to examine how, particularly in the twentieth century, these confining definitions resulted in a tendency to view artists and designers single-dimensionally, and to overlook work that does not fit neatly within distinct categories. Perhaps, as with the emperor’s new clothes, it is time to step back and consider: hasn’t art always had a function? Isn’t there usually artistry in design? It is the contradiction and inherent truth of this duality -- that design and art are simultaneously both different and the same – that enables us to gain new perspective and insight into both, and to discover previously “invisible” work that falls somewhere in-between.

In 1962, as the first works of art later termed “Minimalist” were being developed, art historian George Kubler opened his seminal book, The Shape of Time, with the following statement: “Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things. . . .  By this view, the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art.”[1]  Observing that nothing is made unless it is desirable, Kubler condemned our tendency to clumsily segregate art from functional work as we risk overlooking a great deal of subtle variation, complexity, and divergent examples, as well as ignoring rival systems of thought and production.  He therefore urged that we “view the processes common to both art and science in the same historical perspective.” Maintaining that it is unlikely there are many significant artists who remain undiscovered, he suggested instead that by examining the past with an open mind, “unfamiliar types of artistic effort" will be revealed.[2]

Among the little-known forms of artistic effort currently making what is, in many cases, their first public appearance, are the functional designs from the late 1960s to today made by the artists featured in Design ≠ Art.[3]  Unbeknownst to most admirers of their work, many of the so-called “Minimalist” and “Post-Minimalist” artists also produced a significant amount of furniture and design.  Until recently, these works have been largely unacknowledged by the artists and the galleries that show their art.  The recent emergence of this work represents both an expression of the renewed interest in design, and an admission of the invalidity of past attempts to categorize these artists through only one aspect of their oeuvre.

The separation of “fine” art from design is a fairly recent Western conceit, and has only been considered an issue during certain eras.  So, too, is the idea, still prevalent today, that art is "non-functional.” Throughout Western history, art has functioned as religious, ideological, and political propaganda, economic currency, commodity, decoration, and as a vehicle for personal self-aggrandizement.  The historical delineation between art and design has often been imprecise, resulting in greater or lesser congruence.  As a result, a surprising number of individuals from the past whom we identify primarily as artists also gained acclaim for their functional designs.  It is worth considering a few examples to put the objects discussed in this book in context.

As Arthur C. Danto has observed, by the Renaissance, as painters and sculptors lost their anonymity and became identified by name, “the beautiful and the practical were as much an undifferentiated unity as are, in philosophical truth, the body and the mind.”[4] A number of Renaissance painters, including Raphael, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, practiced functional and decorative arts.  In addition to his various architectural projects, paintings, and sculpture, Michelangelo, for example, also designed functional objects including a salt cellar, an altar table, and an elaborate candelabrum. 

The practice of working comfortably in both art and design continued among many artists throughout the following centuries.  Although best known for his engravings, the Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi also designed architecture, stage sets, and furniture.  In his treatise of 1769, Diverse maniere d’adornare i cammini ed ogni altra parte degli edifizi, Piranesi promoted the need for a modern style of interior design based on eclectic, and often antique, sources.[5] In addition to designing over sixty ornamental chimney-pieces, Piranesi made drawings for over one hundred items of furniture, including chairs, coaches and commodes, as well as clocks.  

During the eighteenth century, there were also very close stylistic correlations in painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts throughout the European royal courts.  In France, for example, the Rococo arabesques in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s paintings were echoed in the furniture and ormolu designs of noted ébéniste Charles Cressent.  Hubert Robert, who gained renown as a court painter for Louis XVI, designed a set of Jacob chairs, "de forme nouvelle de genre étrusque" ("a new form of the Etruscan genre”), and a pair of regal, austere, thrones for Marie Antoinette’s Neoclassical dairy at the Versailles Château de Rambouillet.  In England and the United States, the stylistic parallelism between the fine and decorative arts is readily apparent in portraits by such artists as John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, and Thomas Gainsborough.  These paintings all visibly portray stylistic affinities, from the dress of the sitter, to the realistic depictions of adjacent design objects such as silver and furniture, that complete the settings.  

By the latter part of the eighteenth century, however, "fine” art and the decorative arts in Europe became increasingly segregated. Government-sponsored art  academies began to position painting and sculpture as the highest form of art, defined as "sources of aesthetic pleasure uncontaminated by the squalor of practicality.”[6] This distancing of the so-called “fine” arts from functional design continued through much of the nineteenth century, and it was rare that any designers achieved parity in recognition, reputation, and financial recompense with their artist contemporaries.

The renewed status of decorative arts in France at the end of the nineteenth century was due, in part, to economics.  Realizing that their nation’s population growth was not keeping pace with that of Germany, the French government actively sanctioned the Art Nouveau movement. It hoped that the latter, with its organic and decorative-arts focus,  would bring French women interested in the emergent women's liberation movement, back into the domestic environment.  The government also established an annual Salon for the decorative arts so that they were accorded the same prestige and academic status as the fine arts.[7] Meanwhile, the burgeoning middle classes increasingly collected and used painting and sculpture as status symbols, reflecting their intellectual and cultural prowess.  In his 1908 "Notes of a Painter," the artist Henri Matisse compared art’s cerebral transformative powers to the physical comforts of a good armchair (fauteuil): "What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of any troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every cerebral worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue”.[8]

In 1912, the French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon decided the modern era needed a new architectural setting in which the decorative arts would be integrated with and considered equal to the fine arts.  At the Paris Salon des Beaux-Arts of 1912, he designed a geometrically ornamented plaster façade through which visitors entered into what became known as the Maison Cubiste.  The “house” consisted of three rooms painted in primary colors.  In each room, paintings coexisted as part of a decorative scheme with wall moldings, fireplace designs, mantle clocks, and other functional objects, including chandeliers by Duchamp-Villon, a tea service for six designed by his brother Jacques Villon, and mirrors with inset paintings by Marie Laurencin.[9]  Although the design of the rooms did not conform to our contemporary notions of “Cubist” style, they were considered extremely innovative by promoting a less expensive, diverse “style,”  than traditional interiors that necessitated stylistic unity. 

During the period between the two World Wars, a number of artists in Europe and the United States rejected historical definitions and subjects for art, turning instead to pure, primary, abstract forms.  In a later 1965 article on the burgeoning geometric, minimal aesthetic of many young artists including Donald Judd, art historian Barbara Rose noted two precedents for their radical, and reductivist style: “On the eve of the First World War, two artists - one in Moscow, Kasimir Malevich, and the other in Paris, Marcel Duchamp - made decisions that radically altered the course of art history.”[10] As Rose rightly suggested, it is difficult to understand what came to be known as Minimalism without exploring the Dada work of Marcel Duchamp, and the aesthetics and philosophy underlying the work of the Russian Constructivists.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Duchamp grew disaffected with the auteur aspects and the subject matter of contemporary painting and sculpture.  At the same time, he became very interested in industrial products that offered viewers “the beauty of indifference,” particularly objects whose design was not based on any form of narrative.  In 1913, he took a commercial bicycle wheel, mounted it on a kitchen stool, and declared it art.  He also purchased a commercial bottle-rack which he signed; thereby creating the first works in a series he titled  Ready-mades.  Along with his In Advance of a Broken Arm (a commercial snow shovel hung on the wall), and his infamous Fountain (a mass produced urinal), Duchamp used these ordinary objects to investigate and question traditional definitions of “art.” As he later wrote, " the choices of these Ready-mades were based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . Another aspect of the Ready-made is its lack of uniqueness . . . in fact nearly every one of the Ready-mades existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.”[11]

By rejecting uniqueness as a defining quality for works of art and displaying mass-produced objects as sculpture, Duchamp abandoned the necessity of the artist's hand in making the work.  As Rosalind Krauss has noted, “His work is not intended to hold the object up for examination, but to scrutinize the act of aesthetic transformation itself.”[12]  Duchamp's influence was central to the work of a number of the Minimalist artists.  Donald Judd’s library in Marfa, Texas, contains a wide variety of books on the French artist’s work, and he hung a version of Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm on the wall of his Spring Street home in New York City, around the corner from the bedrooms.[13]  In a particularly Duchampian “twist," Judd also purchased and hung a commercial bottle-rack on the wall of his son’s room at Spring Street, ironically commenting on Duchamp’s Bottle-rack.  The French provocateur also influenced many of the “Minimalist” artists such as Dan Flavin and Richard Tuttle, who used found objects in their works of art.

Although brief, the highly influential Constructivist movement emerged in Russia after the 1917 Revolution and lasted until 1922.  Avoiding “elitist” subject matter, iconography, and materials, the Constructivist artists espoused a new ideology that dissolved distinctions between art, design, and architecture.  Using terminology that anticipated Minimalism, the Constructivists rejected ornamentation.  They defined the fundamentals of their new style of stylistically geometric, abstract forms with a limited color palette; simple, impersonal materials that were easily found and inexpensive; and engineering techniques in place of the individual artist’s gesture.  The artist Vladimir Tatlin, for example, abandoned traditional artists’ techniques and adopted industrial materials including metal and plastic in his work.  He insisted that “the artist must become a technician" and learn the tools and materials of modern production in order to benefit the proletariat.  Among other things, he devised variants of an oven that combined maximum heat output with minimum fuel consumption.  Dan Flavin would later title one of his light-works of 1964 Homage to Vladimir Tatlin, indicating his admiration for the Russian avant-garde artist’s work. 

Even within the Russian avant-garde, however, individual artists held different views.  Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich believed that art was essentially a spiritual activity, and therefore conspicuously non-useful.  Nevertheless, despite believing that industrial design was a secondary activity, after spending time under the influence of the Bauhaus in Munich, Kandinsky designed a porcelain tea service.  Its painted motifs are similar to those in his painting of the same year, Circles in Black .  In 1922, Kandinsky designed another porcelain service, produced by the Petrograd Porcelain Factory, for the first Russian exhibition at the Galeries van Diemen in Berlin.[14] 

Aleksandr Rodchenko was a far more politically oriented artist than Kandinsky.  An avowed Communist, Rodchenko abandoned painting in 1921 in order to devote all of his work to the Russian Revolution.  Like many of his fellow Constructivists, Rodchenko wanted to transform every aspect of life, designing a perpetual-motion machine, posters, candy wrappers, furniture, and teapots, to suit the revolution's theoretical construct.  In 1925, he designed the Workers’ Club, which was installed at the Russian pavilion of the Parisian Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.    The Worker’s Club was widely seen and publicized as an interior specifically created to serve as a center of daily life, amusement, and political activities.  Its design was based on two main principles: economy of space and maximum flexible usage.  The furniture, for example, was made of strictly rectilinear, geometric forms using simple materials and visible joints, with the intention that it could be produced all over the Soviet Union.[15]

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, various loosely-defined groups of artists throughout European and America included decorative arts and design as an integral part of their defining philosophy.  Around 1917, for example, painters Piet Mondrian, Robert Delaunay, and Theo Van Doesburg, joined with sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, and designer Gerrit Rietveld to found a magazine entitled De Stijl in Holland that quickly circulated throughout Europe.  Their aim was to disseminate their new stylistic aesthetic in which, “above all else, truth, function, and construction are expressed.  [De Stijl] comprises all problems of detail, construction, creativity, and economics.”[16] Based on the fundamentals of limited primary colors (plus black and white), rectangular lines, space, and simple forms, their work was intended to have no reference to the representational, concrete world.

The issues of De Stijl magazine often included features on the work of the Russian Constructivists.  Following their lead, the artists similarly engaged design to expand their aesthetic theories to encompass every aspect of daily life.  Sonia Delaunay, for example, gave as much attention to the design of furniture and clothing as she did to her painting.  In the 1920s she worked with Dada propagandist Tristan Tzara on “poem-dresses," and her apartment in Paris became a fashion studio where some claim she introduced the concept of prêt-à-porter clothing. Throughout her career, Delaunay designed cushion covers, lampshades, glasses, curtains, and furniture, including a sycamore commode in 1924.  Like many European artists of the time, Delaunay also designed costumes and sets for various theatrical productions including Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes 

In 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school and movement in order to “coordinate all creative effort, to achieve, in a new architecture, the unification of all training in art and design.” Acknowledging the complexity of designing functional objects, Mies van der Rohe later noted, “A chair is a very difficult object.  A skyscraper is almost easier.  That is why Chippendale is so famous.”[17] In addition to architects Marcel Breuer and van der Rohe, Bauhaus instructors included the painters Paul Klee and Josef Albers.  Although known primarily for his serial paintings, Josef Albers also designed furniture, tea glasses, wallpaper, glass window designs, and record covers.  A number of Albers’ furniture designs appear to be direct precedents for that of the artists working with the tenants of Minimalism several decades later.  Donald Judd, for example, not only was aware of Albers’ work, he was among the first art critics to review and promote Albers' painting, writings, and  philosophy on color interaction in the early 1960s.  Judd maintained a great respect for Albers’ work throughout his life.[18]

The interest in abstraction, and the furthering of a visual language of pure and simple primary forms, continued intermittently throughout the 1940s, often coinciding with more organic, and increasingly emotionally and politically-based art  Constantin Brancusi’s work, for example, although often figurative in its titles, is often cited by the artists associated with Minimalism as a primary influence.  In addition to extraordinary sculpture in metal, stone, and wood, Brancusi designed and crafted abstract stands as furniture-bases for his sculpture.  The artist considered these pedestals integral to the final works. Like so many of the artists who followed him in working with simple materials and minimal forms, Brancusi was particularly interested in the relationship between his work and the surrounding architectural context. 

Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese-American artist, apprenticed with Brancusi in Paris before returning to New York, and developing his own vocabulary of forms.  Throughout his career, Noguchi continually experimented with the opposing styles of geometric abstraction and biomorphism,  and with the dialogue among works of art, design and their architectural context.  As he often stated, “Everything is sculpture, any materials, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.” Presaging Scott Burton’s work, Noguchi aspired to make sculpture useful and integrated into everyday life.  Designing monumental sculpture as outdoor public art became an important element of his later work from the 1950s through the 1980s.  Noguchi’s range was prodigious; he simultaneously worked as a sculptor, draughtsman, potter, product and furniture designer, architect, landscape architect, and stage designer.  In 1939 he designed his first piece of furniture, a low glass-topped table with biomorphic wooden legs.  Through the 1940s Noguchi designed furniture, a number of which were put into production by the Herman Miller firm.  During this decade he also made his first lighting fixtures that he titled “Lunars.” While in Japan in the early 1950s, Noguchi designed his first Akari lamps using traditional mulberry-bark paper and bamboo.  The artist saw these lamps as both functional lighting sources and as sculptures, and designed a great variation of shapes and sizes.  By using inexpensive materials and traditions of working, Noguchi sought to make his Akari lamps available to a large number of people.  By the mid 1950s the Akari lamps were exported internationally, and are still produced today, although a few early prototypes still exist.   In all of his work, Noguchi saw his task as shaping space, in the sense that he believed art should “disappear” into its surroundings with a sense of oneness.

Many twentieth-century artists experimented with both furniture and design.  In Europe, Dada and Surrealist artists frequently combined found objects with incongruous materials in a surprising, and often disconcerting, manner.  Meret Oppenheim’s infamous 1936, fur-lined tea cup and saucer, titled Object, confounded viewers with its bizarre juxtaposition of materials and dis-functionality.  Three years later, Oppenheim designed a table with a circular top held up by two legs.  Rather than using plain straight supports to hold up and stylistically echo the simple table-top, the object’s limbs terminate in the feet of a claw-toed bird.  Many other artists, including Pablo Picasso, worked in clay, creating functional ceramics that were mainly extensions of their visual art’s iconography.  Other artists, including Alexander Calder, designed wearable sculpture, and children’s toys.

In 1961, French artist Yves Klein made a series of tables in which he “floated” his characteristic blue and rose pigments and gold leaf within individual Plexiglas boxes.  Klein was particularly interested in the idea of the infinite - which he called “the Void”- and used monochromatic colors to fill the interior space of the thin, rectangular boxes.   Philosophically, Klein believed in the “raw ground of being, the underlying reality of ‘is-ness’ that unites all things and obliterates their surface differences.”[19]] Commenting in 1963 on Klein’s work, Judd offered his ultimate praise, noting that the artist’s paintings were "simple and broadly scaled, they tend to become objects and consequently, they have a new intensity . . . Yves Klein’s blue paintings are the only ones that are unspatial.”[20]

While living in Paris in 1951, Judd’s contemporary, the painter Ellsworth Kelly, designed a nine-panel folding screen whose design replicates the rhythm made by the shadow of a railing falling across the metal staircase in La Combe, a villa outside Paris.  This was one of many works of the early 1950s in which Kelly explored the effects of light and shadow.  In 1957, he extended the screen format, designing a series of proposals for corporate commissions.  Kelly’s The Seven Sculptural Screens in Brass was eventually installed at the Post House Restaurant, Transportation building in Philadelphia.  During the 1970s, along with Andy Warhol and Chuck Close, Kelly was commissioned to design a rug based on his paintings.  Kelly is adamant, however, that his Primary Tapestry, as he titled this work, be considered as a work of art, and not as a rug.  As he states:

"I don’t consider Primary Tapestry functional or furniture/design as I would prefer it hang on the wall.  I prefer to think of it as a work of art, and gave it a number in my archive similar to all of my other works of art.  I don’t differentiate between my tapestry and my art works; it is just a work of art in another material.  I don’t want any work of mine to be useful in any other way than to be looked at as a work of art.  Because my work is largely made up of simple shapes and minimal qualities, it can too easily be slid into being superficially considered ‘decoration.”[21]

This pejorative attitude towards design as superficial “decoration” remained prevalent throughout the 1960s to the 1980s.  As a result, many artists did not publicly acknowledge or exhibit their more functional, pragmatic, furniture and design objects unless they were incorporated as part of an art work or installation.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg, reflecting the influence of Duchamp, rejected the idea that only selected materials were appropriate to art.  Instead, he mixed painting, collage, and actual objects into so-called combines.   In these works, Rauschenberg often included mattresses, chairs, road signs, coke bottles, blankets, and stuffed animals, fixed or inserted onto painted surfaces.  Through the combines, Rauschenberg was able to elicit viewers’ questioning of the difference between a bed with blankets and pillow on a wall, versus when they are placed on the ground; and how re-situating of objects as art changes our perceptions of these objects. The artist also designed several functional objects, including water- tables, a suite of cardboard furniture, and his Tire Lamp. These works balance the simple, direct materials of Minimalism with Duchamp's and the Dadaists' ironic humor and interplay between everyday objects and art.  Judd was very taken with Rauschenberg’s aesthetic and materials.  In his 1962 review of Rauschenberg’s work for Arts Magazine, Judd noted its  unique qualities , particularly citing “the unrectangular and unflat format, the use of found and simply existing materials, and the casualness are three of Rauschenberg’s radical aspects.”[22]

In 1963, recalling a motel room in Malibu, California that he saw as a child, Pop artist Claes Oldenburg began a series of sculptures related to domestic environments.  The first prototype was a large, angular chair, covered with vinyl imitation leopard-skin material.  The Leopard Chair was built by commercial manufacturers and constructed to slant at an oblique angle giving it an exaggerated illusion of depth.  The chair, like the other elements of his subsequent Bedroom Ensemble, resembles furniture, but, according to the artist they are: “pseudo-functionalist….like they were meant to be enjoyed or to be seen rather than used.”[23]

The true break between art and design in the twentieth century came with the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism, and its emphasis on pure painting, the individual, hand-wrought gesture of making, and the personal psychological expression of the artist.  As early as 1947, in a catalogue essay for the Ideographic Picture exhibition, Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman attacked what he termed the “meaningless materialism of design,” thereby distancing his and his colleagues' gestural, painterly work from the decorative or applied arts.

In April 1966, the Jewish Museum in New York opened an exhibition titled Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture.  Although it featured artists of various contemporary aesthetic styles, the exhibition is also considered to have caused the first widespread awareness of early Minimalist art.  Primary Structures introduced work by previously unknown young artists, including Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, and Richard Artschwager.  Sol LeWitt came up with the name “primary structures” to distinguish these three-dimensional art works from traditional painting and sculpture media. 

Primary Structures and other early exhibitions featuring these artists received a great deal of attention.  Many critics cited the new works' alliance with architecture, and considered their fundamental explorations of space, volume, movement, and light to be “concepts that are at the very heart of the most advanced thinking about modern architecture.”[24] In his New Yorker review, Robert Coates praised the new work, observing that in order to deal with the larger scale of this new form of art, the artists had begun “to functional primarily as a designer[s], making a scale model of the figure or construction and turning it over . . . to the lathe and milling machine operators, the welders, the foundry men . . . who will put together the sculpture.”[25]

The polarization of individualized, gestural Abstract Expressionist painting and the anonymously manufactured objects of the Minimalist artists was furthered in 1967. Clement Greenberg, the most outspoken art critic of the time, celebrated Abstract Expressionism in his essay “The Recentness of Sculpture.” Greenberg declared Abstract Expressionism to be the “true” innovative art form as it was based on the artist’s subjectivity and handiwork. He then denigrated the new Minimalist art, describing it as “closer to furniture than art," and claiming that it lacked formal complexity and feeling and was nothing more than a kind of “good design” that was preplanned and executed by someone else.[26]

Greenberg’s essay, with its disparaging references to design, was published at around the same time as the initial forays into furniture by a number of the Minimalist artists. It therefore probably contributed to a number of the artists’ vehement declarations of differentiation between their art and design work, and to their concealing and downplaying of their functional works in deference to their works of art. Although from the late 1960s through the following two decades such artists as Judd, Burton, Chamberlain, Artschwager, Flavin, and LeWitt continued to design and manufacture furniture and design objects, these were rarely exposed to public scrutiny in gallery or museum exhibitions. Instead, the work remained largely under the radar of public consciousness.

Although problematic, the terms “Minimalism”[27] and “Post-Minimalism” are so commonly used today that it is virtually impossible to discuss much of the work of the last five decades without using them. It is important to note, however, that not one of the artists whose work is associated with these terms accepted the labels. As Sol LeWitt observed, no one ever clearly defined Minimalism or put any limits on what it was: “Therefore I conclude that it is part of a secret language that art critics use when communicating with each other.”[28] Most remained highly critical of having these terms used in relation to their work, and of any implication they carry of “reduction.”  As Donald Judd argued, “I object to the whole reduction idea, because it is only reduction of those things someone doesn’t want.  If my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements that I like.”[29]

Instead of being defined styles or coherent movements, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism reflect an often contentious dialogue among a number of highly idiosyncratic artists working during the last fifty years. Each held distinct, and occasionally opposing, viewpoints of how their work should be defined. In using these terms, one should keep in mind George Kubler’s observation: "Style is like a rainbow. It is a phenomenon of perception governed by the coincidence of certain physical conditions. We see it only briefly while we pause between the sun and the rain, and it vanishes when we go to the place where we thought we saw it.”[30]

Despite their differences, each of the artists in Design ≠ Art has some relation to the tenets of Minimalism. In addition, their furniture and functional objects, to one degree or another, grew out of shared ideas generated through their art. These include an emphasis on the use of simple, geometric, often mass-produced materials; the elimination of detail, narrative, and subject matter; new relationships with the surrounding space and architecture; and a more active role for the viewer. One of the things that makes examining the functional objects made by the artists in Design ≠ Art so interesting, is that from the late 1960s, two contemporary artists, Donald Judd and Scott Burton, publicly posited completely contradictory, polarizing views on how design and art should be considered and defined. At virtually the same time that Judd laid down his thesis declaring the inherent differences between art and design, Burton announced his antithetical view, that all future works of art should also function as pragmatic structures. The design work of many of their contemporaries falls somewhere within the continuum between these two extreme positions.

By contrast, Richard Tuttle deliberately problematizes distinctions between art and design. Synthesizing principles from each, he considers them both as elements of what he terms his “total art.” Similarly, many contemporary international artists are actively refusing to have their work defined as either design or art, categories they feel are misleading and far too restrictive.  As the desire to break down confining boundaries in all walks of life continues into the twenty-first century, it is likely that distinctions between design and art will become increasingly hard to define.

 Notes

[1]George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962, p. 1. Among the thousands of books Donald Judd’s main library in Marfa, are various works on George Kubler and his essential writings.

[2]IBID, p. 1-2.

[3] As the topic is such a vast one, the current discussion in this book is limited to the work of significant visual artists who stylistically, since the late 1960s, have worked in the idiom of minimal, austere, geometric abstraction.

[4] Arthur Danto, quoted in Peter Joseph “Foreward,” A/D Gallery catalogue, Sept. 1992 p. 4-5. Danto also notes, of the three forms listed by Giorgio Vasari in his 1550 catalogue of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, architecture was considered the highest art form.

[5] John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

[6] Danto, op. cit., p. 4-5.

[7] For further discussion of the role of the decorative arts and design during this period see Deborah Silverman, Nature, Nobility, and Neurology: The Ideological Origins of “Art Nouveau” in France, Ph.D. dissertation for Princeton University, June, 1983.

[8]Henri Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908.

[9]See Nancy Troy’s Modernism and The Decorative Arts in France, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

[10]Barbara Rose, ”ABC Art,” Art in America, no. 53:5, October/November, 1965, p. 57-69.

[11]Marcel Duchamp, "Apropos of 'Readymades'," Salt Seller:The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, ed., New York:Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 141.

[12]Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, New York: The Viking Press, 1977, p. 78 & 80.

[13]The version Judd owned and hung in his home was an edition of 1964 by Arturo Schwartz.

[14]Clark V. Poling, Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-33, New York:The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1983. Kandinsky maintained a more decorative approach to his applied designs than did his contemporaries Malevich, Nikolai Suetin, and Ilya Chashnik, who also worked on porcelain design. Their works functioned more as a totality than Kandinsky’s porcelains, with their geometric forms echoed in the applied decoration. 

[15]The work of the Russian avant-garde was not well known in the United States until 1962, when Camilla Gray published the first English-language book on the art of the Russian Supremacists and Constructivists, The Great Experiment in Art: 1863-1922. Judd’s library in Marfa contains a copy of this seminal book. While an art critic, Donald Judd wrote several of the first essays on the work of Malevich and his contemporaries. His library also contains a shelf of books on Soviet architecture.

[16]Mies van der Rohe, quoted in Time magazine, February 18, 1951, also at www.creativequotations.com/one/997.htm active April, 2004.

 

[18]A singular element of the organization of the current exhibition has been its coordination with an exhibition of the furniture and decorative work of Josef and Anni Albers which is organized con-currently on the first floor of the museum.

[19]Thomas McEvilley, “Yves Klein and the Double-Edged Sublime” On the Sublime, exhibition catalogue for the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin, 2001, p.77.

[20]Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine, January, 1963 p. 69.

[21]Conversation with the Ellsworth Kelly, October 3, 2003. For further discussion of twentieth-century artists who made furniture see Domergue, op. cit; and “Usable Art,” exhibition catalog for the Queens Museum, 1981.

[22]Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine, April, 1962, p. 87.

[23]Claes Oldenburg, “Bedroom Ensemble” discussion of this work by the artist quoted http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_e.jsp?mkey=996, active, March 23, 2004.

[24]Charlotte Willard, “The Shape of Things to Come,” New  York Post, May 8, 1966.

[25]Robert Coates,, “The Art Galleries,” The New Yorker, May 21, 1966.

[26]Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: Dutton, 1968.

[27]The term was first coined in 1927 by David Burliuk, a painter, who defined “minimalism” as “reducing of painting to the minimum ingredients for the sake of discovering the ultimate, logical destination of painting in the process of abstraction, Marcia Epstein Allentuck, ed., System and Dialectics of Art ,Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971, p. 115-6.

[28]Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” of 1967, quoted in Sol LeWitt, Alicia Legg, ed., New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978, p. 166-7. Meanwhile, in 1966 British philosopher Richard Wollheim’s essay “Minimal Art” characterized the new art of the 1960s as having “minimal art content” but did not differentiate between what we think of today as the Minimalist works and Pop art. Terminology was often a contentious point among the artists , particularly those who like Robert Morris maintainted that his work was “sculpture”. Others, who were interested in having their work represent a conscious shift from traditional forms of art, followed Judd’s lead and classified their work as neither painting nor sculpture.

[29]Judd quoted in “New Nihilism or New Art?”, interview by Bruce Glaser with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella, New York, NY, February 15, 1964, broadcast on WBAI New York, March 24, 1964. Los Angeles: Pacifica Radio Archive, Tape #BB3394.

[29]Kubler, op. cit. p. 129. 

New Approaches in Contemporary Curating, Spring 2006